Audio coding is used in many applications and environments such as satellite radio, digital radio, internet streaming (web radio), digital music players, wireless mobile devices, and a variety of mobile multimedia applications. There are many audio coding standards, such as standards according to the motion pictures expert group (MPEG), windows media audio (WMA), and standards by Dolby Laboratories, Inc. Many audio coding standards continue to emerge, including the MP3 standard and successors to the MP3 standard, such as the advanced audio coding (AAC) standard used in “iPod” devices sold by Apple Computer, Inc. Audio coding standards generally seek to achieve low bitrate, high quality audio coding using compression. Some audio coding is “loss-less,” meaning that the coding does not degrade the audio signal, while other audio coding may introduce some loss in order to achieve additional compression.
In many applications, audio coding is used along with video coding in order to provide multi-media content for applications such as video telephony (VT) or streaming video. Audio coding is also commonly used in mobile devices that support multi-media applications, such as video games, and the like. Indeed, mobile devices increasingly incorporate a wide variety of functionality and content that provides audio output to a user, and therefore makes use of audio coding techniques. Audio and video information may be segmented into frames, which comprise blocks of audio and video data. A stream of audio output can be defined by a sequence of audio frames, following decode of the frames.
Unfortunately, different mobile devices assume a wide variety of configurations. In particular, different mobile devices may use different platforms. For example, some mobile devices may include more memory than other mobile devices. In addition, the processing power in different mobile devices can vary drastically. Because of this variation in mobile device platforms, the content providers for such mobile devices are often forced to design different software applications for the different devices. The same video game concept, for example, may need to be designed differently for devices that have different platforms. A lower quality cell phone may have insufficient memory or processing power to ensure the real-time decoding of audio information of a given multi-media video game that is designed for a higher quality cell phone. In this case, the content provider may need to redesign the video game to reduce the audio complexity of the video game, in order to allow the game to function on the lower quality cell phone.